November 16, 2014 - 22:48
For my next paper, I want to take a look at academia as a disabling institution. Obviously, I'm coming from my own struggles this semester as a jumping off point, but I know that there are a lot of directions I can go--working further in the direction of my own experiences and physical disability or looking at mental disability, as in Mad at School. I'm also looking into a personal essay from a professor who has had to navigate academia as both a disabled person (I have yet to read the actual essay, so I don't know what kind) and an immigrant published in a book called The Politics of Survival in Academia: Narratives of Inequity, Resilience, and Success. I'm hoping that this will give me more of a multicultural perspective as well as another lens of intersectionality; I actually sought out a piece that I thought could enable me to view this topic through a mulitcultural lens (because I'm an anthro major and that's my thing) to add another layer to our conversations about academia, given that much of the disabling comes from the American education structure and the European model of university education. I'm hoping that the piece will frame my discussion and give me a better sense for how I want to approach such a broad topic. I want to better examine how disability interacts with the college/university, for both faculty and student, and how that relationship is affected when the person being disabled is, as the author comments, particularly invested in his education because the opportunity is not one he would have received had he not come to the United States. We've discussed crip time a lot, and the limitations of cripping the classroom and institution, so I'm interested in looking more at crip time in academia and, furthermore, the ways that intersecting identities can shape how we look at crip time.